Not exactly a coin toss

Part of the reason I built the hand analyzer was that I didn't totally trust the odds I would see on the television. Whenever someone turns over Ace - King or Ace - Queen against a low pocket pair they always say that it is a coin toss. Well I decided to run 23,000 hands a see exactly how close it is to a coin toss.

You can see that after my 23000 hands are run, the low pocket pair (in this case 6's) wins decidedly by about 9.5 percent advantage over the Ace - Queen. I also let the two over cards have one of the same suit as the pair.

http://www.potnut.com/pa/screenshots/cointoss.jpg

In my second example, Ace - Queen versus pocket 8's, I decided to not overlap the suits. I ran the simulation again, this time for 50,000 hands. After it is all said and done, with no overlap of suits this time, the 8's are the decided winner, this time by 11.5%.

http://www.potnut.com/pa/screenshots/cointoss2.jpg

So the next time you flip over your small pair to someone's over cards, and they say 'coin toss' be sure to correct them. Take your 10% advantage and win yourself some money with it.

Recompiled latest version of Silverlight

Hi everyone,
I was able to successfully recompile the project using the release version of silverlight, I am having some strange issues with one of my custom controls, where I can't play around with it in design mode, but I can compile it and it works.
I might have to just start from scratch on this control and build a new one if I can't figure it out.
Anyway, the app is working and I would appreciate some feedback. I have an idea of what I would like to see this app do, but it can only get better if you give me some input.
Jay

1.01 Bug fixes, found solution to card size

Hi all,

I fixed a couple of bugs, first of all if two people both have a flush of the same suit, the person with the largest heart in his/her hand will have the higher score, thus will win the hand. Previously it wasn't taking into account other ranking cards in the flush.

Secondly I figured out a solution to allow the cards to be drawn smaller, my next step will be to allow 10 (or 11) players to all be drawn on the board at once.

Also I need to put a table in the background, and fix the summary of the kickers so it doesnt bleed over into another persons hand. This will take a lot of tweaking, but not necessarily a lot of coding.

Comments, as always are welcome.

Jay

Version 1.00 Released today!

Hi everybody,

Well its been a long road to get here, well okay not that long only a couple of months, but a lot of code has been written to get to this point.

Version 1.00 is working and has all the originally envisioned functionality. I only go up to 5 players at the moment, the reason isn't because more players are harder or anything, its just that the size I picked for the cards is a bit too big. You can expect that in a future release the cards will be be better sized, and potentially there will be an actual table not just a green background. Also things like buttons and stuff will moved around, and maybe the interface will change, things will look different. I also hope to continue adding functionality on it.

Percentages are calculated on the fly, and the number of times a player wins a hand based upon a simulation is kept track of, until the refresh button is pressed, or until one of the redeal buttons is pressed.

Please post here, or contact me at getref@hotmail.com.

Added Some Player Tracking Ability

Hi all,

It has been a while since I posted an update for everybody, so I figured I would compile the latest version and post it so you can see what is coming up.

I added a small grid on the left hand side that will be used to track how many times a player wins a particular hand. I'm not 100% sure how this part will work just yet, I think I will allow the user to reset the grid whenever they want, and it will automatically reset when you change the number of players on the right hand side.

Work continues, slowly but surely. I have much more in store for this application.

Work stalled

Well work has temporarily stalled on the hand analyzer. I haven't forgot about it, but a new project just started at work and that leaves me less time to self-teach myself Silverlight.

I posted the latest build up, so everyone can play with it. It isn't much different than the last build, except it allows 5 players now. I think I need a smaller deck of cards if I am going to try and squeeze 10 players onto this table, either that or I need to increase the size of the table. I dont want to do this because it might cause problems for people with smaller resolutions than what I am running.

This is a fun project, and I will definitely work on it more, but for a little while work is going to be going at a slow pace. I need cards with smaller images (I can probably just resize these ones if I need to, in fact Silverlight might have an object that I can use that will resize the image for me.

As always, feedback would be much appreciated. Early feedback makes it a lot eaiser for me to change the application, and the earlier I fix / create something the easier it is to integrate. Late fixes always seem to be more difficult/sometimes impossible without a total rewrite.

Addition of Hand types / Declaring a Winner

Well work is going well on this Silverlight project. There are only two hand types that the application does not properly check right now, a straight and a straight flush. Correction, it does check a straight, but it doesn't assign a score or a high card associated with it so the application would not be able to tell who won the hand if both hands had a straight.

I expect to have both of these algorythyms (straight flush and straight) completed soon, and have already tried adding a player to the board and my logic seems to work good for 3 players. I will try adding 4 - 10 hopefully soon as well.

I wanted to post a code update for everyone so that they can see the progress so far. Projects like this have a tendency to suck up a lot more time than they initially feel like they should take. This project is no exception to the rule.

If you find any places where the code seems to be acting in a way that it shouldn't then let me know. Please be very descriptive as to how to replicate the problem/error (step by step process).